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Women with 50-pound sacks of rocks on their heads clambered down the path, carrying the loads to a nearby village where they would be crushed by hand and by machine, mixed with water and mercury, in a search for specks of gold. At the mine itself, discovered about a week earlier, scores of men were crouching on a steep incline, each digging just below the surface and filling their sacks with stones.        </p><p>
Under the tarpaulin, a dozen men had joined forces and were taking turns digging deep into the rock. At one spot, one man wearing blue shorts and a brown T-shirt squatted five feet down a pit, holding a chisel with his gloved left hand and a mallet with his bare right hand. A giant boulder was balanced precariously over the pit, held up by two sawed-off branches.        </p><p>
“If we didn’t put those branches there, this pit would collapse,” the man in the pit, Jumaah, said while looking up, his smiling face glistening with sweat.        </p><p>
A former farmer who like many Indonesians uses only one name, Mr. Jumaah, 45, was one of the countless men seeking their fortunes in the gold rush that has swept this part of eastern <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/indonesia/index.html?inline=nyt-geo" title="More news and information about Indonesia." class="meta-loc">Indonesia</a>. With gold prices hovering at record highs, illegal gold mines began flourishing here three years ago on the island of Lombok, better known to outsiders as a tourist destination. In impoverished corners of Lombok like Sekotong, the discovery of even a few grams of gold has allowed families to replace their thatched huts with houses made of concrete.        </p><p>
But with little experience in mining and with few adequate tools, hundreds are believed to have died digging in illegal mines. The authorities also worry about the long-term consequences, as the gold seekers use mercury to extract the precious metal and release the residue into the environment.        </p><p>
“We know that’s the cause of minamata,” the mercury poisoning disease, said Ispan Junaidi, a spokesman for the West Lombok government that includes Sekotong.        </p><p>
The authorities had tried many times to shut down the illegal operations, which reopen as soon as the police leave an area, Mr. Ispan said. That is why it was impossible to determine how many people have died in collapsing mines and rock slides, he added, although estimates were in the hundreds. Fearing that their mines could be closed, diggers do not report deaths.        </p><p>
Mining companies began prospecting for gold in Lombok in the late 1990s, and 17 have been granted mining licenses by the local government, Mr. Ispan said. But for reasons that remain unclear, the central government has yet to open Lombok to gold mining, he added.        </p><p>
Gold has long been mined in other corners of Indonesia, which is one of the world’s top producers of the metal. But it was only about three years ago, after gold prices rose sharply in late 2007 and early 2008, that the illegal gold rush began here. Ethnic Chinese Indonesians began hiring puzzled locals to amass rocks from the mountains — but did not tell them what they were seeking.        </p><p>
“The Chinese go to school, so they understand about mining. We don’t go to school,” said Maksud, 39, the owner of Intan Rizkia, the largest gold buyer in Sekarbela, a town two hours’ drive from here.        </p><p>
Still, the locals figured it out fairly quickly, and soon thousands from all over Lombok and even farther were converging on Sekotong. Stories spread of diggers finding life-changing chunks of the yellow metal. Most, though, made enough to buy or rent rock-crushing machines. The booming industry became concentrated in Sekarbela, which has a long history of jewelry makers who served the island’s historical kingdom.        </p><p>
One recent evening, gold sellers streamed into Mr. Maksud’s store and received quotes scribbled on scraps of paper, which they often took for comparison to one of the other half-dozen buyers in town. Mr. Maksud bought the 24-karat bits for about $45 a gram, earning, he said, a commission of 2 to 5 percent. He then melted the bits into gold bars, he said, opening an unlocked drawer where a bar weighing three pounds lay inside.  </p>
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<div class="articleSpanImage"><img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/07/08/world/08indo1/08indo1-articleLarge.jpg" width="600" height="360" alt="" border="0">
<div class="credit">Kemal Jufri for The New York Times</div>
<p class="caption">A miner breaking up rocks in Sekotong. </p>
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